Stones tauten in the woods: they have little
friends, ants and other animals
that I don’t recognize. The wind doesn’t
sweep away the stone, those holes, those
remains of a shadow, that life of heavy
dreams.
Remains in the shadows: I’ve a burning heart
and then it crumbles naively remembering
not to die.
I’ve a heart like that forest: quite
sarcastic at times, its gross branches
fall on your head to weigh you down.
*
I’d like to give you all my blood.
But it runs in small inextricable
rivulets, and doesn’t scratch your front
door with enough tenderness
to keep us afloat.
Or maybe you’re here to come with me? I
lost the ways myself to your
sad house. I see nothing but lights
and sunsets that seem diabolical to me.
You’ve potent rhymes for me, I can’t
account for it other than through your
being king of my days.
Insomnia
My eyes that won’t open, from
sleep or torture, and yet here you are,
choosing another way: medicine
so as not to fall asleep.
My eyes feel full of sand
so much had dawn done waking up
and forced to patch things up launching
grounds for appeals; not to wake up
but instead it’s five every day
before the night finds you on your feet
or lost in sleep.
*
A quick ruckus of muffled wings
this incest shall not
take place.
In the hollow of the hand remains
only a fluorescent thinking?
The natural and
cultivated sciences
my cry of a girl without a dove.
*
I dreamed relatives’ visits
clumsy women and unions
I join those who live more alive than I
eviscerating the plants, emitting a cry.
Then proving yourself unequal
to the cause while lice flash
writer in poverty, the mind
disturbed by nonsense.
Like a beast your indulgences, and
pillows sank comfortably
in a kind of clause without a cause
without emitting a sound.
While flasks of wine and habitual traps
winked at such virginity
and now she fumbles in the backfield
humbling her hands.
from Document
Amelia Rosselli
translated from the Italian by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
Listen to "Insomnia" read in the original Italian by the author:
Translation takes a lot of time and, if one has a cotranslator , coordination of schedules. The two of us have been collaborating for years, first over the phone and lately taking advantage of wonderful Zoom. When working on an author such as Rosselli, where tradition and innovation are so deeply intertwined, almost every word is a challenge, and the experience of cotranslating Document has been exhilarating, to say the least, with the two of us endlessly debating solutions. While Deborah delved into the depth of the target language, Roberta was digging into the source language, trying to unearth as much as she could in order to convey to Deborah the movement of Amelia’s poetic voice and precise meanings. Rosselli’s intentions, in short.
All of Rosselli’s poetry is characterized by an inner tension between the geometry of the prosody and the freedom of the language. Document is a challenge, but we were drawn to the magnitude of this text. It took Rosselli seven years to complete the process of selecting poems for it. The final work, published in Milan by Garzanti in 1976, includes 175 poems, chronologically ordered as in Francis Petrarch’s famous thirteenth-century canzoniere. Long fascinated by the classical sonnet as an ideal model, with Document—her third and last major collection—Rosselli went a step further by adopting Petrarch’s approach, i.e., generating meaning partially through the sequencing of the collection, thus helping to contain the flood of her poetic work. At first glance, nothing seems to be farther from Document than Petrarch’s carefully built collection. However, Rosselli was well aware of the interplay between autobiography (albeit highly idealized) and fiction in Petrarch’s poetry, and she was fascinated by what it means to tell a story through a collection of poems—in Rosselli’s story or stories, as in Petrarch, autobiography is always knowingly lurking. Speaking of Document, Rosselli said: “It was hard work, those who do not write poetry cannot imagine what difficult studies poets do to compose, even if they live on a budget and even if the principle remains that poetry is either inspired or worthless.” This “hard work,” one Rosselli was most fond of, resulted in the transformation of the literary model of her predecessor Petrarch into an innovative and ambitious venture reflecting the challenges of her own subjective experience—the pain, the intensity and turmoil of her existence—and of our own violent and chaotic times.
All of Rosselli’s poetry is characterized by an inner tension between the geometry of the prosody and the freedom of the language. Document is a challenge, but we were drawn to the magnitude of this text. It took Rosselli seven years to complete the process of selecting poems for it. The final work, published in Milan by Garzanti in 1976, includes 175 poems, chronologically ordered as in Francis Petrarch’s famous thirteenth-century canzoniere. Long fascinated by the classical sonnet as an ideal model, with Document—her third and last major collection—Rosselli went a step further by adopting Petrarch’s approach, i.e., generating meaning partially through the sequencing of the collection, thus helping to contain the flood of her poetic work. At first glance, nothing seems to be farther from Document than Petrarch’s carefully built collection. However, Rosselli was well aware of the interplay between autobiography (albeit highly idealized) and fiction in Petrarch’s poetry, and she was fascinated by what it means to tell a story through a collection of poems—in Rosselli’s story or stories, as in Petrarch, autobiography is always knowingly lurking. Speaking of Document, Rosselli said: “It was hard work, those who do not write poetry cannot imagine what difficult studies poets do to compose, even if they live on a budget and even if the principle remains that poetry is either inspired or worthless.” This “hard work,” one Rosselli was most fond of, resulted in the transformation of the literary model of her predecessor Petrarch into an innovative and ambitious venture reflecting the challenges of her own subjective experience—the pain, the intensity and turmoil of her existence—and of our own violent and chaotic times.
Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris on March 28, 1930, and took her own life in Rome on February 11, 1996. She was the daughter of the antifascist Italian political leader and philosopher of Jewish descent Carlo Rosselli and the British political activist Marion Cave. After her father's assassination in Paris at the hands of the fascists, the family moved to England and then to the United States. After the end of the war, she relocated to Europe in 1946, first briefly to Florence and then to London to complete her studies. In 1948, Rosselli was back in Florence prior to moving permanently to Rome, where she would remain until her death. Rosselli was the author of many collections of poetry in Italian, including Variazioni belliche (War Variations; Garzanti, 1964), Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series; Il Saggiatore, 1969), Documento (1966–1973) (Document; Garzanti, 1976), Primi scritti 1952–1963 (First Writings; Guanda, 1980), Impromptu (Impromptu; Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1981), Appunti sparsi e persi, 1966–1977 (Notes Scattered and Lost; Aelia Laelia, 1983), Diario ottuso. 1954–1968 (Obtuse Diary; IBN, 1990), and Sleep: Poesie in Inglese (Sleep, Garzanti, 1992). She translated poets such as Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and was an accomplished musicologist and musician who played the violin, piano, and organ.
Roberta Antognini is originally from the canton of Ticino in Switzerland, where she currently resides. She is associate professor emerita of Italian studies at Vassar College, where she taught for over twenty years. Her research interests lie in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and twentieth-century Italian literature, and literary translation. Since retiring, she has continued to read, write, and translate poetry. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch’s letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (The Autobiographical Project of Petrarch’s Familiar Letters; LED Edizioni Universitarie, 2008), and coeditor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (Postscript to Giorgio Bassani; LED, 2012). With Deborah Woodard, she has translated five of Amelia Rosselli’s collections into English: Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015; also with the translator Giuseppe Leporace), Obtuse Diary (Entre Ríos Books, 2018; also with the translator Dario De Pasquale), The Dragonfly (Entre Ríos Books, 2023), Notes Scattered and Lost (Entre Ríos Books, forthcoming 2024), and Document (World Poetry Books, forthcoming 2025). With Peter Robinson, she has edited and translated Giorgio Bassani’s The Complete Poems (Agincourt Press, 2023).
Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012), and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). With Roberta Antognini, she has translated Amelia Rosselli’s Hospital Series, Obtuse Diary, and The Dragonfly. Woodard and Antognini’s translation of Rosselli’s Notes Scattered and Lost completes their translations of Rosselli’s short texts and is forthcoming, also from Entre Rios Books, in the fall of 2024, while World Poetry Books will bring out their translation of Rosselli’s longest collection, Document in winter 2025. Woodard cocurates the literary series Margin Shift: Friends in Poetry and teaches at Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle, Washington.
